How To Submit (for mobile users):
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@thewritingtree
How To Submit (for mobile users):
VIA TUMBLR APP
VIA BROWSER (Safari)
...and we’re back! if you were around when we did haiku, thank you for returning. if you’re new, hey boo! feel free to scroll back to some older posts and get familiar with The Writing Tree. you can read previous submissions, but there’s also some cool info on different poetry forms (with examples). the world is kinda crazy and I think it’d be cool to write about something else, but no pressure. hope everyone is staying safe/sane, I can’t wait to read what you submit. 💚
NaPoWriMo 2014, Haiku Challenge & Other Goodies
It’s been awhile, I know, and I’m full of apology.
However, it’s a new year and National Poetry Writing Month is upon us again. Without challenge there’s no change, so if you’ve fallen into a writing slump (which is completely of the mind), join us!
There are a great number of ways to celebrate NaPoWriMo (click here!), but my favorite way is…haiku/senryu. My challenge is to write one haiku for every day in April. This idea is not unique, many poets try to write a poem a day, but with this platform we can uplift, encourage and hold each other accountable.
Why haiku?
1. It’s short and forces us not to waste any word/syllable.
2. I think it’s a dope introduction to poetry for those who do not consider themselves writers.
3. Our lives are busy and maybe writing a sonnet each day seems like a lot to commit to. I think haiku makes the goal seem a little more attainable.
There are thirty days in the month of April. Can we write at least thirty haiku/senryu? I think so.
Submitting is easy.
Just make sure to let us know what number it is, along with a title (if there is one) and a link to where we can find you. If you have a preferred name/pseudonym, tell us that too.
If you’re posting on Twitter, make sure to use the hashtag “TheWritingTree”.
That’s all.
The last tidbit I have to share with you is about Write Bloody Publishing. Andrea Gibson, a phenomenal poet, is curating an anthology with Write Bloody and they are currently accepting submissions. The work is to be called, “We Will Be Shelter”. Find more about it here. If you’re a poet interested in social justice, then I think you should submit.
Fin.
Happy Haiku-ing!
The Haiku Challenge begins today and I look forward to all submissions.
NaPoWriMo 2014, Haiku Challenge & Other Goodies
It's been awhile, I know, and I'm full of apology.
However, it's a new year and National Poetry Writing Month is upon us again. Without challenge there's no change, so if you've fallen into a writing slump (which is completely of the mind), join us!
There are a great number of ways to celebrate NaPoWriMo (click here!), but my favorite way is...haiku/senryu. My challenge is to write one haiku for every day in April. This idea is not unique, many poets try to write a poem a day, but with this platform we can uplift, encourage and hold each other accountable.
Why haiku?
1. It's short and forces us not to waste any word/syllable.
2. I think it's a dope introduction to poetry for those who do not consider themselves writers.
3. Our lives are busy and maybe writing a sonnet each day seems like a lot to commit to. I think haiku makes the goal seem a little more attainable.
There are thirty days in the month of April. Can we write at least thirty haiku/senryu? I think so.
Submitting is easy.
Just make sure to let us know what number it is, along with a title (if there is one) and a link to where we can find you. If you have a preferred name/pseudonym, tell us that too.
If you're posting on Twitter, make sure to use the hashtag "TheWritingTree".
That's all.
The last tidbit I have to share with you is about Write Bloody Publishing. Andrea Gibson, a phenomenal poet, is curating an anthology with Write Bloody and they are currently accepting submissions. The work is to be called, "We Will Be Shelter". Find more about it here. If you're a poet interested in social justice, then I think you should submit.
Fin.
Happy Haiku-ing!
Hey Guys! Are you ready for another haiku challenge?
One we'll actually finish?
Depending on feedback, we'll start soon :)
Reblog + Support + Take Part!
The Voice Of A Receipt.
I hope you purchased everything you wanted.The tapes that no longer have the rewinding capability that created many playbacks. The brussel sprouts that brought up tax-like emotions that you couldn’t stop disliking. The televisions that accept your undivided allegiance and attention. Did you satisfy the financial appetite that lives in your pockets? You’d think so, but I don’t.
These people will never see me when you throw me away, nor will they hear my cries when you crush my spirits until they are no more. You see, they’ll never know about your dirty deeds or how you’ll always pay per view even though you truly can’t afford it. But as much as some people may take care of me, while others may wish me away, all your spending secrets will stay me, even if I expire.
- Smeek
Chimera: A Dialogue
by: Frances Ruhlen McConnel
(Source: here)
One of the strangest instances of the vanishing twin within the womb is twin cannibalism in which the surviving twin literally ingests or absorbs the remains of the other one.-- TLC.Discovery.com
Two in a pod, two in a hold, two in a teacup, commas curled together, Yin & Yang tumbling end over end. Yet one grows fatter as one thins. One drinks in as one seeps away. One’s shape sharpens as the other’s lines blur. One grows fingers and toes; for the other, at the wrists and ankles, clumps, then knots, then fraying threads, as cells flake off, migrate across the black waters.
Twin One:
Come to me then, you who are but a shadow, a print in sand filling with water. Gulping you down, I make you my own. I make you immortal.
Twin Two:
One body is not one mind. One mind is not one thought; even one thought is not without its undertow. Your world ends where your senses end. Though you’ll think always what you see is. I’ll know it is only what you see.
It’s better to be contained than container. I, the cell and you, the mitochondria. I’ll be the cell and you the bee larvae.
You, the cell and I, in prison. You will be queen bee and all else slaves.
Then for your freedom, I give you my sleep; I give you my dreaming.
Is this your dream then-my nightmare?
I give you the choice of dreams: the nightmare is your defiance
The only other choice is to go quietly.
Quietly, then, dissolve quietly on the tongue as bland and gossamer as a wafer. In this way we’ll share a blessing. And you needn’t ever be lonely.
And you will always be lonely, remaining without; though you think yourself sum and substance, want will be your maiden name.
Why must you curse me?
Millions are cursed daily, as millions are devoured. There is no devouring without the stain on the teeth.
There is no devouring without love. For who would devour what one hates?
But many learn to hate what they must devour.
And you can give me no blessing, though I bless you, as you go down.
Such blessing obliterates the supplicant.
It obliterates only your pain.
“Only” is all I have. Only in holding myself back can I save you.
Save me from what--from ourself?
Yes, if ourself is an illusion. To grant the boundary of surface is to grant breath-right to others.
You’ll have my senses. To share the same surface is the most complete love; You’ll breathe when I breathe, suck what I suck.
Your desire negates surfaces, the skin where nerves lie. In the depths is only dumb satisfaction or dissatisfaction.
But I can satisfy both of us.
You’ll satisfy yourself only. There is no self without say-so, without yes or no.
Do you think yourself my conscience, then, Old Crosspatch, Old Scold, Old Naysayer?
I am your supreme nothingness, the distant plop of a bloody thing at the bottom of a dank well, as amorphous as algae stink.
Not my nothing so much as your almost, your perhaps.
I’ll be the hesitation between desire and act I’ll be the scoffer, your second thoughts and your last failure of nerve.
You won’t see me in mirrors, but perhaps in running water. My image will both confirm and cast suspicion, both deepen and fracture, will bring you doubt and make belief necessary.
Though you learn double-talk with your forked tongue, I will be left with the old language of nudge and tickle, hiccup and slap.
Then preach no more, tiny flaw in my surface. Slip away, tadpole, slip back to the egg and before that the blind thrashing of last season’s urges, go as the weak go into the maw of unbecoming.
I don’t say “goodbye.” I say in your deepest within will be an unknown darkness, a restless being you can’t reach, a question you can never resolve. If this is immortality, I give it thee. Also if it is the buried pip of the Fall.
A tendril, a filament, plants itself in a soft skull and sucks. A last gulp and the body is smooth as a pearl, smooth and smoky with one dimple only where outside is in and inside closes over what is other and what is left but the need, desperate but not out of the question, for an Other, an outsider’s love.
separation anxiety
this is what it is a pattern forced into groove each first third and fifth at the parking lot we meet my fruit is scattered from me
north to x-husband south to y-baby daddy it is no wonder z never really gained chance I is still raging in me
real consequences they could not be avoided our tight trinity made strong in adversity daily we rise and we win
- eMinor
It Is You
I just want to live in the shelter of you just want to feel safe in the presence of you want to get lost in etymology with you this is all I desire of you I just want to get lost in the embrace of you just want to be consumed by you want to feed my lust with you I only want the love of you grow senior and wiser with you I want to love us with you
- eMinor
[Haibun] Smiles.
Pictures. How I would despise talking so much that I would close my borders because my slightly unaligned gates were never ready to be seen. Those close to me in the line would tell me to smile and as I did, my snow-covered tongue would be seen in the cracks & gapes, further influencing me not to open up unless asked to. The hours I’d operate on would never be as flexible as they are now.
White, shimmering smiles. gates opened for visitors never shutting down.
- Smeek
the real journey of a writer
(source here)
The real journey of a writer – or any creative – isn’t to publication, rewards, acclaim, but to your own voice.
When you find your voice, you connect to yourself, and then through yourself to the world. Your work resonates. As Thoreau once wrote in his journal, “The whole is in each man.” (And each woman.)
I’ve always felt that your voice is twofold: not just how you write, but what you write about. They inform and shape each other.
You need to read, look, listen, absorb. You need to take the world into you so you can reinvent it through your own point of view.
You need to tune out external voices that speak in the language of the shoulds – you should do this, you should do that – and move into the secret life of your intuition. This other life has its own mind. It will guide you to places that, because they are yours, remain – as yet — unknown and uncharted. For all the self-help and how-to that fills our culture, success is, in the end, as unique to you as a fingerprint. You can only make that path by walking it. It unfolds in front of you. Sometimes it carries you along.
So you need to write.
And write.
And write.
You need to write past the point of self-consciousness. You need to quit trying to write: to be clever, witty, pretty, poetic. (Perhaps your true voice is none of these things.) You need to fall through the words into something else entirely.
(Blogging can be exceptionally good for this.)
We start by imitating the styles of others. That kind of mimicry – conscious or not – is like a trapdoor opening beneath you.
It drops you into yourself.
It’s when you lose yourself that your true voice starts to come out of the dark. It might be raw and naked. Or howling and slightly mad. Your soul is stamped all the way through it.
Finding your voice – what to say, how to say it, how to speak up in the world – is about making your truth manifest. When you’re moving in the grooves of that soulprint, you know it. And so do others.
This is art.
Art happens wherever your soul’s on the line.
Examples: Haibun
1. Days of Summer
by: Dan Hardison
Before plastic bottles, soft drinks (also known as soda pop) came in glass bottles. To encourage their reuse, the empty glass bottles could be returned for a deposit. But even with its bounty, glass bottles could still end up along the roadsides much as their plastic counterparts do today.
As a kid, we would bicycle down the road and collect these discarded bottles, and return them to a grocery store for their reward. Then we would buy candy and baseball trading cards with our newfound wealth.
clap, clap of cards on the spokes of bicycles . . . days of summer
2. Words, loves
by: Steven Carter
bAdd unwritten poems to the laundry list of lost things—not that astronauts saw anything unusual when they cruised above the moon’s dark side! Today I plop down on the bank of the Swan River, right where it bids farewell to Swan Lake on its way to Flathead (as big as Tahoe). I pick blossoms from a wild apple tree and toss them into the green ripples—each one a thank-you for a job I didn’t get, back in the day. As I watch the river disappear around a bend, this thought: the universe = a computer programmed to solve a problem, the problem being.us. Big Bang, Big Whimper, so what? We’re here, or seem to be. Stars at eleven a.m.: invisible, like (you guessed it) so many unwritten poems. So: not what the words mean, not what they “do,” not what’s beyond them or even between them; what the words are—that’s the skeleton key. To what? Haven’t the words, of course. our back-and-forth— snow-geese know the other way from us
3. The Question Unanswered
by: Chen-Ou Lin
slanted sunlight in the Meditation Hall a drift of dust
"Every question you answer," I say timidly, "leads to another question." The air conditioner continues its rhythmic humming.
"And do you have another question?" the master asks. For the first time, I notice that there is a small twist to his mouth.
More info here/here.
Examples here.
"The prose should add depth to the haiku. The haiku should add meaning to the prose."
Robert D. Wilson, editor of the e-magazine Simply Haiku, includes these features for a haibun:
"a linked form. The link is between narrative, prose sections and one or more haiku."
wide range of styles and content.
minimal repetition of words and phrases; "what is written is tightly constructed".
strong haiku that can stand alone as poetry.
"Haiku ... relate to previous prose sections yet not be an extension of the prose. The oblique but relevant association between haiku and prose is the defining moment of the haibun. ... The haiku link offers readers a springboard to multiple, and often unexpected, meanings."
Literary magazines that publish haibun:
Haibun Today
Contemporary Haibun
A Hundred Gourds
SunnyDay Tanka
Sunshine at first glance
Days like this I love to breathe
Plans ahead, break free,
Feet to green Earth, walk lightly
Aim: celebrate gracefully!
- eMinor
Cold Reality
My mind, a labyrinth My warm body, a haven In my embrace: waste My heart; like a pendulum Search me, degrade me, leave me.
- eMinor
Tanka: #4 Night/Day
the woman dances rivers rise and fall and break she doesn't notice morning after. she cools her tea and shakes palms. unaware.
- Shanyce
Tanka Time: tangles
If you sink your hands in a woman's kinky hair, you can't just pull out.
Hangs on you like orgasm; You smell islands in your sheets.
-bellum.